Saturday, 21 November 2015

In the end, I want to say that the trouble is neither Islam nor Christianity nor Judaism nor laicism nor atheism, but that all of those groups who in one way or another identify themselves as such or as a belonging to a faith, have their own share of fascists.These will stop at nothing, either in imposing themselves on one another, or on the enemy that is people who wish to have nothing to do with them, but who, on the contrary, wish only to be free of them; nor will they hesitate to collaborate with one another in this objective - to conquer the rest of us.

I recall as short a time ago as 25 years old friends of my parents who were holocaust survivors and exiles from Germany or Eastern Europe from those pre-war years, and also left-leaning Zionists ( I disagreed that this was actually possible, but we could then disagree), and who were also observant Jews, used to say that Begin was a fascist terrorist and Netanyahu even worse; since then, of course things have got properly worse, as we know, with the once calmly religious town of S'fad becoming a world centre of racialised theology. Heaven knows, fom my own work, I know the history of the Bataclan pretty well, and the last four decades of Jewish ownership interest me little as such; after all I have been in a hotel owned by Qatari capital and eaten in places owned by all kinds of people without suffering too much guilt. If, then, the ex owners - they have actually sold it on in the last few weeks, held Zionist fund raisers there, it is not a reason to kill its audience. The ex owner agreed this:

In 2006-2009 at least, Le Bataclan hosted the annual fundraising gala of
the French Jewish Migdal nonprofit group for the Israeli Border Police.
Last month, it hosted a gathering of some 500 Zionist Christians who
came there in support of the Jewish state.

So what was going on? The 'Border Police' actually police an illegal occupation that is officially recognised as such by the UN and the EU, yet disavowed; so what is the charity in this, and for whom must it count as charity? Who are the Christian supporters of Israel if not the VERY far right fundamentalists of the various Christian sects and churches?AND what does it mean that, in the last few weeks, the French Appeal Court, the Cour de Cassation, has rendered the advocacy of BDS, disinvestment and boycott in illegally established (in EU law, that is) West Bank businesses itself illegal? And that it has done this so as to in effect recognise Israel as a Jewish state, which it is not under its UN charter, on the grounds that to advocate BDS is to incite racial hatred and discrimination? I advocate BDS, as it happens, and I don't stop saying this when I go to France.

In effect the court, in implicitly recognising the the "Jewish State' as an 'ethnie' has more or less completed the relation of the Vichy state to the Jews in collaboration with its Nazi allies, but at this time in the interests of a political class in control of Israel, who also want to change the constitutional nature of that state to one of being Jewish.

So who are the fascists now? Well, the killers of the crowds in Paris for certain, though their degree of self hatred is pretty much unexampled for fascists; for though they are fully signed up for 'strength through joy' and train with the same hyper eroticism of becoming-killer as any colonial army (The French in Algeria, the Americans in Iraq), they prefer to die achieving their objectives than to live to enjoy their conquest. But I would rather say they are fascists than Jihadis because that keeps open our political options and allows us to ask who were their victims?

Well not the myth of plural and multicultural Paris. The lives and torment and memories of these victims are being exploited for a racist and political myth, in which the sclerotic and profoundly Zionist laicity of the French state (and some of the international press) and the clerical fascism of Jihad fight it out between themselves. A certain set of 35 - 45 relatively successful urbanites, neither rich nor poor, highly professional in the main, enjoying a life that, politically, is both well meaning and in denial of those who are absent from their happiness, the suburbs, the poor; these wretched individuals are literally shot through in a terrible game in which they had not imagined themselves to be participants.

That is a wake-up call is it not? How do we face those who are the fascists without perpetuating this wretched myth of happiness?

It's truly terrible.

I've been reading les Inrockuptibles since in started out over thirty years ago and I'm 70, and their journalist who died in Bataclan, whose work I have read, was 43, so that gives you a little idea of a time-scale.

None of us are that YOUNG.

Here is a coda, carefully anonymised.

I have a friend who is a close friend of a person who lost someone close in the Charlie Hebdo attack. We had lunch together. This person was in deep grief and mourning, but also supremely angry. Suddenly, after years of silence, distance and neglect, a relative had emerged in another country who announced to the awaiting press that this was bound to happen to the Jews of Paris, it was because of being a Jew. This was hardly the important truth of that person's life and death, but it went down better than the private grief of the nearest loved one. This person was outraged and enraged; the rage had the dignity of a certain truth that is also, right now, dying in the imperialist aftermath of the Parisian horror and its appropriation of the massacre for its own finalities.

When it all unfolded we were at dinner with some friends in the Rue J-P Timbaud, and sirens and the lines of ambulances under the window alerted us to a disaster that could, until that moment, have been on another planet, rather than just around the corner. Three hours before we had walked down the Rue de la Fontaine au Roi; so it goes and so we did not go. I still cannot quite imagine what has happened.

But it's hard to walk on without asking who are the fascists now?andwhat would now be a united front?

Tuesday, 17 November 2015

The polyglot chic, the swagger and the noise – the Paris I love will come back

'incidentally, it is worth pointing out that the 11th arrondissement
is increasingly known as “bobo-land” (for bourgeois-bohème), where the
young and fortunate live in shabby-chic smugness'
Much as I respect his writing, this is hardly incidental. Au
contraire. If it is not the heart of the matter either, it is the flaw
in the heart of a myth about Paris that is specific to Paris, even if
gentrification is not, and that myth implies an exclusion, a system of
exclusions that, in their own weird and horrible way Daesh recognise in
their statement characterising their attack as one on a centre of
'debauchery'. Daesh and Jeffries are equally deluded by the myth, the
'swagger', the cigarette 'on the lower lip'. This is why the suburbs and
their brutal treatment by the state remains at the heart of the matter,
and it seems that neither Jeffiries nor Daesh want to make an issue of
this, in effect.
If the Bataclan is a 'popular' culture, then the life of the suburbs
can never become that, if films like Amélie and all the recent trash on
Piaf continue to be churned out, then the fundamental African-ness of
contemporary cultural energies as the substance of what 'French' means
will continue to be repressed. La Haine will turn out to have been a
better film than ever we imagined, and Kechiche the prophet of a bobo
imaginaire of playful shepherds and shepherdesses of multi-cultural
bliss (l'Esquive).
I spent up to a half of each year in the onzième between 1983 and
2006, and at no point did I notice a growing inclusiveness, either of
outsiders(the poor, the 'racaille' of the suburbs, as Sarkozy called
them) or even of the older people who lived there, rather the
replacement of one myth of the popular by another in radical distinction
from the development of forms of life and living.
Anyway on the train returning from Paris this weekend I read a book
by the French leftist fiction writer Didier Daeninckx 'Corvée de bois'
(2002) which is the first person narrative of a Sorbonne student who
ends up in the army fighting the war in Algeria. DD brilliantly
reconstructs the mind and physical energies of a mass killer of the
Algerian villagers and torturer of the NLF, who becomes an apparatchik
of the repression of dissent in France, and let me tell you, nice
readers of this page, that if Daesh have a role model in this horrible
massacre, you need look no further than the French colonial army, the swagger of it, the cigarette on the lower lip -- only now one arrests women wearing the hijab, even 'nice people' call the 'letterboxes', or one mows down those who don't.

Of course, without a doubt, Frieze Masters is a wonderful show and fills me with an insatiable and unrequitable greed. I wrote once before about it, I'll append the piece here, see the end of this. But the exercise of this greed is such a relief from other, more orderly responses to the main show in itself (critique, distance) and the things in it and how they are shown. At Masters I hungrily accumulate walls-full of Ivon Hitchens and other British landscape painters of that kind, alongside the odd cubist Severini and a couple of Schiele drawing, a row of Mary Martin reliefs. Why not? I like that stuff a lot and almost indiscriminately; a North German, dismal and vicious little altar piece, carved or painted, of the 1480s, would add a little truth of European history to the muted-sublime escapism of my irreproachably middle class taste. In the end the glory of Masters is that you stumble on images without curating, ordering and judgements made other than by the catching of your eye.

Yet, when I come to the nearby stands showing Sekulla and Goldblatt, why would I buy them? Why would anyone buy them here? To put up on one's Mayfair or Monte or Santa Fe or Moscow dining room wall to remind one to be angry when one looks up from one or another super-food? (idiot idea, no, super-food?) To stop one sleeping? Or for their self-evident beauty, their now almost pastoral recall of a lost epoch of appropriate anger(s) and empathies? Steve Edwards, in his little book of Martha Rosler's Bowery makes this important reading of the ambivalence of an engaged art that ineluctably fuses an exquisite form with anger, passing time and loss.

So with the Kentridge: the problem with Kentridge is this, that in inventing a new medium, a fusing of the hand made mark with the pixel in movement, in still, or with the anamorphic mirror in a literal virtualising of the mark, he gave rise to something in itself exquisite, and excitation to visual greed, as much as the Martins or the Sotos and Frieze, and, moreover, it always seems to work. So at one level the Goodman show is ravishing, stimulating, a bulimia of visual pleasures. But what of the ideas? What do the words do to his medium, his (it is only his, a singular medium) medium to the words and musics? The repeated Mao slogans that become minor puns, the sub-intensive satirising of right-feeling?

They produce a sense of gentle wisdom, the wisdom of the prematurely old and wise, but the name for this wisdom is, otherwise, Alain de Botton, AKA KITSCH at the very structural level of thinking. Grand parades round huge spaces, bloated and overblown gestures and borrowed politics from distant sources (Paris Commune references for example, to point to some everydayness in catastrophe).

The contradiction of Kentridge's work, that once I admired to a certain extent, but of which the decline is disastrously instantiated in the infinite kitsch of the Winterreise 'project', is that is power of seduction, at the level of its sublimely satisfying medium or material, has become the very measure of its hollowness. Like advertising; neither anger nor pleasure in the end; just fatigue, in the finding of free space, space free from all of that, the same wasting effect, in the end, as Frieze.

Waiting
for Frieze, (2009?) for the late WOUND MAGAZINE, commissioned by Ken Pratt

Writing
on Frieze for Wound, for Wound on Frieze, it sounds like saying the same

thing
twice, twice times the luxury edition, does it make two or is it nothing more

than
one? Luxury squared = luxury and nothing more, one VIP is as good as

another.
There is a difference. mind you. Wound does not have to try to be more

Saturday, 20 June 2015

Wednesday, 25 March 2015

This Friday I have renounced my presentation at CSM called 'Running with nuns', taking off from thiss frame of R W Fassbinder:

Alas I fell prey to some horrible throat thing, and I will do it another time - but the nun bibliography is proving so interesting that I am glad for another few weeks to become a true dilettante on the matter. Of Course Teresa of Avila will be there, as well as Somerset Maugham's version of her. But basically you will eventually see that this is another piece concerned not so much with nuns as such, but with my programme of enunciation via film citation.... but last Friday,

the Horror

as it happens an especially enjoyable evening at UCL on an evening, yet again, in these days, devoted to the aftermath of Civilisation in the manner of Kenneth Clark hosted the CREDOC, one of the many acronnamed university set-ups of these funding days. One of the Cs is Civilisation.
One of the things we forgot to talk about enough was precisely the Horror.